BELIEVING AND SEEING

151 pages, 2 maps, 40 illustrations from photographs and drawings of rock paintings, yellow cloth, a very good copy in the dust jacket which has slight insect damage at the fold of the front flap.

'Dr Lewis-Williams began his work with the San rock paintings in 1959. He has made a special study of every example in the Giant's Castle and Barkly East areas of southern Africa, some 3,600 in all, and has submitted his inventory to numerical analysis.  He has combined an exhaustive study of published and unpublished material with his own field work amongst the !Kung of Botswana and South West Africa. This has enabled him to identify important and persistent values and beliefs and to show how these have been translated into the graphic symbols of the art. He suggests that the paintings were neither mere exercises in primitive aesthetics nor purely evocations of sympathetic magic for the control of hunting. Rather, they are associated with the whole fabric of ritual and the activities of the medicine men who exorcised sickness, made rain and controlled the movements of game.' Editor's note.